What is a Course?

What is a Course?What is the concept of a "Course" in 30hands? You know what a course is in the real world, but what is it on the web? At 30hands, we are providing teachers and students with an eClassroom on the web that in many way matches the way a physical classroom works. A 30hands Course is the "room" or container that groups together students, digital learning materials and collaboration areas. It is a place for the learning community to come together to find information and interact.

Some teachers use web sites, wikis or social media for a web presence for their students. 30hands courses combine that all together into an easy-to-use and consistent user interface. Because everyone is so busy, it has to be easy to create and easy to modify content and structure without worry. Our goal is to help teachers better engage students and help them learn how to interact in a digital world.

Courses contain all of the following:

Home Page that can include rich text and multimedia

Announcements

Digital Bookshelves to organize content from virtually any source (modules)

Structure to make it easier for students to find content (modules, home page, consistent navigation)

Presentation Showcase (for 30hands Mobile or other videos and presentations)

Timeline and forum for discussions and conversations

Blog for essays and student-expression of ideas

Student Portfolios of their work (profiles)

Small Group collaboration (groups)

Iterative Assignments that follow the student-teacher workflow

To sum it up, a Course is an area for teachers to create their classrooms on the web for access and interaction anywhere, anytime and on any device. There's a lot of functionality, but it's easy to start with something simple.

A simple course and modules where students can access digital content and discuss it

A fun home page and a place to easily store and access 30hands Mobile presentations

An interactive timeline with a forum where students and teachers can have conversations and discussions. And we include 1 level of threading, too!

A place where students can blog

A place where students view assignments, hand them in, get reviews from teachers, resubmit, get more reviews and iterate!

Remember, 30hands is all about iterative creativity which means thinking, creating, reviewing, revising and thereby taking learning to a higher level. Iteration also makes it easier to get started with learning at an incremental level.

Overview of the Course Structure

Overview of Course Structure in 30hands Cloud

Next StepsThe first step was easy -- to read this document. The next step is easy, too. Just register for a teacher account and create a course!